This program will help you think and act more strategically when it comes to developing your agency’s most vital resource: its people. You will learn how to create a performance management system that differentiates between high and low performance and determines how to measure and communicate performance objectives. In addition, the class will cover succession planning that develops workforce capabilities for meeting current and future challenges. Finally, it will cover the creation of Individual Development Plans and strategic methods for linking personal development goals with organizational strategy.
This course is part of the Executive Pathways series, and is required for the Master of Science in Leadership.
OPM Competency
A “Perfect Storm:” Human Capital in the Federal Government
There is no doubt that those who lead our departments and agencies are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of people challenges – personnel reductions, hiring and pay freezes, declining morale and increasing attrition. Given the scope and magnitude of this fiscal fallout, every employee has to be considered a mission-critical resource. As a consequence, leaders at every level of government must begin to think about their employees strategically and to devise their own personal human capital strategy, one that addresses every aspect of the “life cycle” – from recruiting, training and development and pay, to performance management, retention and separation.
Brookings Executive Education’s Maximizing Human Capital, May 8-9, 2012, will examine each of the challenge areas noted above, with the objective of helping agency leaders and managers successfully confront these challenges within their departments and agencies. It is also intended to prepare participants to develop – and, more importantly, execute – their own human capital strategy. This course will address such topics as:
- How to leverage pay, performance management and other incentives to motivate public employees;
- How to implement personnel (and other budget) reductions ‘smartly’ while taking into account both current and future needs;
- How to avoid unnecessary confrontation with labor unions and find common ground in the face of workforce turbulence;
- How to leverage diversity and inclusion to improve employee engagement and the bottom line; and
- How to prepare the next generation of Federal leaders to successfully meet tomorrow’s challenges.
In that latter regard, this course will further examine what is on the Federal government’s human capital horizon – what is going in Defense, at OPM, on the Hill and elsewhere that will affect civil servants both now and in the future.
Brookings Executive Education has put together an unprecedented faculty line-up that includes current human capital ‘movers and shakers’ from DoD, OPM, IRS, Congress, etc., as well as former senior officials who literally helped shape today’s civil service. Former Federal Chief Human Capital Officer, Dr. Ronald Sanders, is lead faculty for the class.
Dr. Sanders most recently served as the U.S. Intelligence Community’s first Chief Human Capital Officer, where he played a key leadership role in the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and was a finalist for the 2010 Service to America Career Achievement Medal. Dr. Sanders has also served as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s first Associate Director for Human Resource Policy, as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s first Chief Human Resource Officer, as the Department of Defense’s Director of Civilian Personnel and now serves as Chair of Brookings Executive Education’s Advisory Council and as Senior Executive Advisor and Fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton. With over 37 years of Federal service (twenty as a senior executive), Dr. Sanders has achieved a national reputation as a human capital visionary, change agent and innovator, playing a key leadership role in some of the Federal government’s most historic organizational transformations. Dr. Sanders will thread his insights from these experiences throughout this dynamic course.